Hey, everyone likes a quiz! “Match the author with the pen name. ” (via)

The Book Bench writes up The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that’s popped up at occupation.

Bookfox on the difference between creative writers vs other kinds of writers.

Michael Copperman’s “letter to my talented writer-friend A., who fears she will never be published.”

Holy crap, this was quite a week. Come read what Rumpus Books has been up to. …more

After an impressive rally of 800 yesterday, police shut down the Occupy SF encampment last night, taking all the supplies the encampment’s residents had rounded up.

This seems to me to be a significant misstep from the City of San Francisco. The protesters aren’t giving up, and they’re starting over again from scratch. I wasn’t planning on going down there today, but now I am. I hope some more of you come out, too.

Canongate speaks out on publishing Julian Assange’s unauthorized autobiography.

Kesey and Kerouac sitting in a tree, or not really at all.

This is how to master not feeling so bad about your employment prospects in two weeks in book review format, and it’s very timely for yours truly.

“Maybe this will be another century in which reading changes forever.”

It was one hell of a week at Rumpus Books. …more

The founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael S. Hart, has passed away. If you’ve never been to Project Gutenberg, go check it out. It changed my life, and maybe will change yours, especially if you have a boring job. (via)

The New Pages is looking for reviewers.

“since we haven’t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to.” — The New Yorker Book Bench on the threat to the indie St. Marks bookstore in New York.

“Can a Book Save Our Life?”

Rumpus Books was up to a lot this week. Come see. …more

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.”

I’m not a particularly devout tennis fan. In fact, I call pretty much all athletic competition sportsball, because I don’t have to keep track of as much stuff that way. But David Foster Wallace’s essays can always make topics I find completely uninteresting completely spellbinding. In light of Federer apparently doing something interesting lately, the NYTimes is republishing DFW’s essay on the tennis player here.

Today, the earth has traveled around the sun ten times since a bunch of assholes made our world a worse place.

Electric Literature has a good roundup of what the book blogs have written up about 9/11.

Moving on: this will go down in the annals of excellent book marketing: if you become a fan if Murakami’s faceboom page, you get to read the first chapter of his novel.

Amazon and the state of California have declared peace on the sales tax issue, finally.

One study says reading makes us more aggressive. Another says it makes us more empathetic. In the words of Bookslut, “It’s nice that you’ll feel for the other person that you’re beating the shit out of.”

Sunday’s the day to catch up with Rumpus Books. …more

“This is a police state. This is Arizona, and worse, this is my country. I must remember this moment. I must not forget even if I want, even if, when I’m back home in bed, the whole scene seems impossible.”

— From Day 5 of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s trip to the Arizona-Mexico border. You can check out everything she wrote about the trip on her blog. She went there to volunteer with No More Deaths, a group devoted to ensuring that migrants don’t die of thirst and other serious health issues in the desert.

These are really fascinating accounts and a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in what’s happening on our border. Her blogs are horrifying and real and human and sad.

Photo of a water bottle left for migrants by No More Deaths, slashed by a Border Patrol Agent.

Here’s some very very short stories that only take a second to read but will make your day better.

“She’d busted me ogling high heels and cleavage at an after-hours party.” — At 100 Word Stories, “Seasoning” by R. Neal Bonser.

“The ending of this all is that I butchered the cow in my garage. For this, I had no clothes.” At Monkeybicycle, “This is a Drawing A Drawing for YOU” by xTx.

“(Bob Marley’s) question “is this love?” to which the answer is probably not.” — At elimae, “What Makes Me Uncomfortable” by Jimmy Chen.

“I bought the cheapest wedding band I could find—$59.95 at Kmart, and worth every penny.” At wigleaf, “The Opposite of Free” by Angi Becker Stevens.

I’m feeling concise today.

Jessa Crispin on sexism in the arts.

Flannery O’Connor tweets? (via)

A classic but always excellent video: Vonnegut charts a story. (via)

At the Paris Review, on William Steig’s art.

Happy Labor Day Weekend from The Rumpus. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.

…more

“Jokes about vegans, Tyler Perry or the Gipsy Kings end up being way more volatile than jokes about race, slavery or the Holocaust. Whiteness and Palestine are guaranteed to make folks uncomfortable. ”

— Steve Almond interviews Nato Green over at Salon about Laughter Against The Machine, a tour and documentary he’s doing with comedians Kamau Bell and Janine Brito. The tour hopes to use comedy to “move Americans past the grievances that divide them, to the problems we face collectively.”

This is a great cause, but it’s expensive, and they can use your help.

“There has been a dream in literary circles since the late 19th century of wrestling control of publishing from New York. It’s happening.”

Tom Lutz of the new LA Review of Books is interviewed on the decentralization of the publishing world and the “excitement” he sees in the west coast literary world.

“If there were no such thing as fiction, we’d have had to invent it, if we ever wanted to make sense out of a thing like the Vietnam War.” It would take 53 years to spend one day telling the story of each soldier who died there. A great essay on the “generosities of fiction” over at The Millions.

For us nerds, Buckminster Fuller explains Einstein’s E=mc² in a single telegram.

“(I)f you don’t subscribe to at least five lit journals while you’re trying to get published in lit journals, then you’re a literary parasite.” (via)

A profile of a writer who never lived anywhere. (via)

Whether you’re boiling to death in the west and center or hunkered down under battened hatches back east, I can’t think of a better time to sit inside and catch up with Rumpus Books. …more

Brooklyn’s story from the writers who have defined it. (via Mark Athitakis)

Bookslut points to this article on neuroscience, or “how the cerebral cortex has become a 21st-century version of Warhol’s soup cans or Marilyn Monroes.”

A reading of Oral Roberts MFA candidates and more previews from this year’s AWP.

Amber Sparks on writer’s rituals.

It’s Sunday again, always the best day to catch up with Rumpus Books. …more

“For a long time we’ve been talking about the benefits of reading with respect to vocabulary, literacy, and these such things. We’re now beginning to see that there’s a much broader impact.”

— Keith Oatley, a scientist at The University of Toronto, conducted an experiment in which he showed that the simple act of reading Chekhov’s short story “The Lady With the Little Dog” slightly changed people’s personalities in scientifically measurable ways.

“It helps provide quantitative, empirical, scientific evidence for a lot of the benefits of reading,” he says.

Their blog OnFiction has more on the psychological benefits of literature, if, like me, you find that this stuff makes you feel better about all that time you spend writing and reading.

At Full Stop, how much do interns in the publishing industry earn?

Mark Athitakis points to this fascinating article at Big Other about the difference between the novel and the short story.

Emma Darwin (Charles’ wife) apparently took issue with his dwindling faith after he developed the theory of evolution. Here’s his response, with a beautiful poem to her at the end.

And finally, via Libraryland, here’s some typewriter art! (the link is in German, but the art is above all that language stuff.)

It’s a lazy, August Sunday, which is the perfect time to catch up with Rumpus Books, preferably in a hammock. …more